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This Week's Program: Wednesday, April 17, 2019

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MARIO MURILLO is a veteran community radio practitioner who currently serves as the Vice Dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University.

Mario will talk with Tiokasin about the Minga protest in Colombia. A powerful indigenous movement in Southwestern Colombia that organizes through the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, also known as the CRIC. They believe the Colombian government is ignoring systemic violence to indigenous communities—failing to enact peace programs that were designed to end five decades of armed conflict and violating over a thousand legal agreements that protect minority groups’ land and sovereignty rights. In February, leaders from the Council demanded that President Iván Duque Márquez meet with them to discuss these concerns. But at the president’s refusal, they orchestrated a “Minga”—which indigenous leaders consider a spiritual principle of resistance tracing back to colonization. Since the 2016 Peace Accords, 454 Indigenous leaders, farmers, poor people, have been disappeared or assassinated due to their demands that the state adheres to the signed principles in question and consequently leading to the demonstrations in Columbia.

Indigenous rights activist TINA NGATA (Maori). Tina will talk about “He Tirohanga Ki Tai: Views from the Pacific Shoreline, Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery,” an art exhibition that exposes the historical fallacy of the European "discovery" of Aotearoa. The exhibition will be on view April 24 - May 2, 2019, at 51 7th Avenue in New York City. Tina blogs at The Non-Plastic Maori (https://thenonplasticmaori.wordpress.com/)